Virgin Megastore launches m-coupons

Virgin Megastores in New York and California has launched a campaign using mobile coupons to bring customers to their stores. Customers can receive in-store discounts on many products including CD's, DVD's, books and memory sticks or cards for the mobile phone. Virgin partnered with mobile coupon company Cellfire for this project.

Mobile coupons are an area of rapid growth. The reason for its popularity is that they benefit everyone - for advertisers it allows them to bring customers into their stores, and for the consumer they receive a free or reduced price product.

The Cellfire system is based on an application that the customer downloads to their phone. To get the application they either send a text to a short code or go to the Cellfire website (www.cellfire.com).

Once the application is installed, Cellfire automatically uploads coupons to the phone on a regular basis. The coupons are easy for the customer to find, because they are all stored in the application, as opposed to coupons that arrive by SMS which can be harder to locate in the phone. Once the customer has found an offer they are interested in, they click on it to receive a coupon on their phone which they can present to the store to receive a discounted price.

Another interesting feature of the campaign is the possibility to get the address of stores where you can redeem the voucher in your area simply by clicking the ‘locations' link. Although the coupon looks like a bar code, what actually is important is the 5 digit code in the middle. This is the number that the customer presents when redeeming their voucher. This resolves the problem that most stores do not have readers that can read mobile bar codes.

“In the past few years, Virgin Megastores have worked hard to make our stores a lifestyle destination by offering our customers the best in music, DVD, books, fashion, games and electronics, so we see this marketing promotion with Cellfire as an excellent way to reach out to our customers through the mobile channel,” says Roger Ritchie, senior marketing manager, Virgin Entertainment Group, North America.

Cellfire has been in business for just one year, and is one of the first coupon and discount offer services focused on mobile consumers. In their first year, Cellfire issued more than 4m coupons, which are redeemable at over 2,000 stores across the USA. The redemption rates seen on these mobile coupons are very high, up to 20 times the rate seen on paper coupons. They are also eco-friendly as they do not use paper.

“Virgin Megastores is the perfect partner for our core audience of young people, who depend on their cell phones daily,” comments Brent Dusing, CEO, Cellfire. “We are continuing to deliver value-added partners across many retail categories that are providing unique and compelling discount offers to our growing user base of savvy shoppers.”

Other advertisers to use Cellfire's mobile coupons include Hollywood Video, EMI Music, Domino's Pizza, TGI Friday's, and 1-800-flowers.com.